Denise Z. Davidson's "Surviving Revolution"

Denise Z. Davidson is Professor of History and Director of the Humanities Research Center at Georgia State University. She is the author of France After Revolution and coauthor of Le roman conjugal.

Davidson applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book, Surviving Revolution: Bourgeois Lives and Letters, with the following results:

Page 99 of Surviving Revolution appears a few pages into a chapter on the weight that bourgeois families in early nineteenth-century France placed on intergenerational ties and responsibilities as visible in their childrearing practices. The page delves into an episode dating from January 1817, when Catherine Arnaud-Tizon, the matriarch of one of the families discussed in the book, finds herself in conflict with her youngest daughter, Adèle, who is pregnant with her first child. After Adèle expressed a lack of interest in following her mother’s advice, Catherine wrote to her eldest daughter, Amélie, for the second time in two weeks to express her shock and frustration. (A quotation from the first of the two letters appears on the previous page.) In addition to voicing her feelings, Catherine’s letter provides details on key components of preparing for childbirth in these years including choosing the right “accoucheur” (a male midwife or doctor) and a wet nurse, matters about which Catherine had strong opinions. Catherine then explains that she will not stay with Adèle while waiting for her to go into labor, because “like you, I realize that our young household needs to take care of itself. We must allow them to figure things out on their own, and I assure you that I will no longer attempt to offer them advice…. I will go only when my presence becomes necessary.” The chapter argues that intergenerational cooperation was essential to families’ successful navigation of the challenges they faced as France moved from republic to empire and back to monarchy. This letter provides a rare example of such cooperation going less than smoothly, a situation that caused the more experienced woman to feel angry and hurt. Such feelings rarely appear in the correspondence that serves as the basis for this study, as letter-writing served primarily as an opportunity to share good news and reinforce positive emotional ties. The page ends with a few lines introducing a new topic: the family’s discussion of Adèle’s due date, which sheds light on how people worked through such matters before the rise of modern medical knowledge and techniques.

Does the Page 99 Test work? The answer in this case is yes and no. Readers turning to page 99 would get an accurate image of the book’s approach: a focus on private, intimate spaces and discussions through the lens of familial correspondence. The anecdote discussed on the page serves as a typical example of the nitty-gritty of everyday life that fills much of the book and that I argue gives us a deeper understanding of bourgeois lifestyles and attitudes during this chaotic period in French history. In addition, the letter writer, Catherine Arnaud-Tizon, a mother of four who lived through the Revolution in Lyon and later helped her husband run their business in Rouen, plays a prominent role throughout the book. However, this single page does not give much insight into the book’s larger arguments about what it meant to be “bourgeois” in the decades following the French Revolution and how wealthy families navigated this period of rapid change. In addition, the topic of pregnancy and childbirth occupies only a small space in this chapter and rarely appears elsewhere.

Surviving Revolution is divided into two parts. Part one provides a brief overview of the lives and trajectories of the two families at the center of my story from about 1780 to 1830. Part two contains five thematic chapters focused on marriage, childrearing, business and property, socializing, and politics. Relying largely on the thousands of letters I read in the archives, these chapters discuss networking and correspondence practices as essential tools that these families relied upon as they lived through regime change, warfare, and economic crises. The strategies these families employed to survive during this chaotic moment in history included focusing on family and the pleasures of private life and relying on longstanding, trusted allies to help them to accomplish their goals. These methods dating from two hundred years ago may help readers reflect on their own efforts to persevere through difficult times.

Learn more about Surviving Revolution at the Cornell University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue